Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes, the adoption one was carried but on the same day there was a second referendum on Trinity College and the NUI combining their Seanad seats into one panel of six seats. That referendum was also passed but for some reason it never came to pass. There was some flaw found in the wording of that referendum. I often ask what happened to that provision.

Time is running short. Some people might believe that to speak for 20 minutes on an issue like this would be difficult but I could speak for twice as long if the time was available. While this is strictly a non-party-political issue, I wish to point out that previous Governments set up the Office of the Minister for Children and former Deputies Brian Lenihan, Mary Hanafin, Brendan Smith and Barry Andrews had special responsibility for children at various times. Some were what we would now call "super juniors" and sat at the Cabinet table. I welcome the decision to give full Cabinet rank and a full Ministry to Deputy Fitzgerald. There has been a continual evolution in terms of the opening up of Irish society, which has crystallised in the Minister's appointment.

I always felt that a Minister for Children was necessary. Nothing convinced me more of that need than when, in 2010, the Fine Gael spokesman on justice, Deputy Alan Shatter, issued a report, without proper protocol, on two children who died in care. On that particular day there was a meeting of the Committee of Public Accounts and I asked Professor Brendan Drumm how many children had died in the care of the HSE. He had no idea, not an iota. He had no clue. Professor Brendan Drumm was an excellent chief executive of the HSE and did outstanding work from a medical point of view, but there is only so much one person can do. The issue of child care did not rank up there with cancer treatment, orthopaedics, accident and emergency waiting times, waiting lists, discharge policies and so forth. It became clear to me then that nobody in the HSE was giving priority to children. I praised Deputy Shatter at the time, which was not a popular thing to do among my colleagues on the Government side because they felt he had broken the rules by publishing the report. He did the State some service by doing that because ultimately it forced the HSE to act and under Cathal Magee, Professor Drumm's successor, a report on the 196 children who died in care was published. That needed to be done because there was total neglect of this area. The child care services in the HSE were the poor relation and might have continued to be were it not for the reports that came into the public arena. Deputy Shatter has contributed to where we are today and while he may have broken some technical rules about issuing reports - some might even argue that legally he was wrong to do it - he was right in the general approach he took. He forced the HSE to examine its files and find out how many children died while in care or shortly after leaving care and then issue a full report.

It has already been said here that this referendum is not a panacea for problems related to children but is an important step. When the Minister gets the weight of the public behind her on 10 November, with an overwhelming vote in favour of this referendum, I hope that will translate into good financial resources to make the wishes of the people of Ireland, as expressed through the ballot box, come true. If the people go to the trouble to come out on a Saturday, taking time out of their family life, and vote overwhelmingly in favour but then find that budgets for children's services are cut, they will feel badly cheated. Given that the Government has decided to hold this referendum, it must follow through with the financial resources to back it up afterwards. We are seeing such cuts already. The services provided by the respite care centre for children in Mountrath, County Laois, for example, have been scaled back remarkably. That centre serves children with special needs, which would be in the Minister's own area, as well as Deputy Kathleen Lynch's at the Department of Health. Everyone praised the Paralympians and people with special needs during the summer but once the event was over, people had seen the gold medals and the publicity died down, we were back to the harsh reality of limited resources for services.

There are two issues that I ask the Minister to address during the course of this debate, which are not specifically related to the referendum, but are in the realm of unintended consequences, to use the Civil Service speak. At the moment there are up to 6,000 children in care, the majority of whom are in foster care. The foster parents who are standing in for the natural parents who are not in a position to care for their children are doing all of us in society, the children themselves, as well as the natural parents, an enormous service. They are rightly being compensated for the cost involved in taking a child into their homes. It is important that if such families want to move on and adopt the foster child they are caring for, they will not find themselves at a financial loss by choosing to adopt rather than continue to foster. Some type of transition payment must be introduced to assist those people who have taken children in, with goodwill and a big heart. They would not have fostered children in the first place unless they had the heart, interest and fondness for children but they should not be financially disadvantaged. I ask the Minister to take that issue into account.

The second issue that I ask the Minister to address relates to the points raised by groups such as Fathers for Justice. In many one-parent families, the mother is rearing the child and the father is not on the scene. The mother may be living with somebody else and the father of the child is not welcome. The majority of these cases do not go to court because the father does not have legal guardianship. I am not sure if the Minister has considered this but let us take a situation where a parent who has a child is no longer capable of caring for him or her and the HSE takes the child into care. In due course, the HSE might decide that the foster family caring for the child should be allowed to adopt. What if the other parent who had not been given the opportunity to participate in the child's life then comes forward and wants to be part of the child's life? That parent might argue that he or she was essentially locked out by social and family circumstances. In most cases, the parent in question would be an unmarried father. Such fathers want to be assured that their child could not be adopted against their wishes. I understand there are issues in the proposed adoption legislation for non-voluntary adoption where the parent has failed in his or her duty.

Will the Minister clarify the position in a case where one parent has failed in his or her duty but the other parent is now willing to step into the breach? The voluntary placement for adoption of a child of marital parents is also being dealt with in the Bill.

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